Recent blog entries for hilaire

Finally Dr. Geo version 1.0.0 was released the 1st January of 2005. I will continue to stabilize it, eventually adding some features but not that much.

A long time I haven't post anything there.
Yesterday I have just release the 0.6.0 version of Dr.Genius. It now integrates Guile, so it is possible to add script item in the figure to do various funny things. It appears now DrGenius needs a documentation.

I tried today, wtihout any result, to integrate the Gnome documentation system in the drgenius2 module. I feel developping under Gnome become more and more painfull, it is no more fun! This is actually not good when developping free software :-) For the Dr.Genius documentation I am now seriously considering using Hyperlatex to generate both PDF and HTML documentation. I have used it for my job and I am quite happy with it (HyperLatex examples ).

Narf narf!! Today I fix a bunch of bugs in the undo/redo engine of Dr.Genius. I wonder when this thing will get totally fixed.

Oh well I never mention it there before: Freeduc is there , it is brought by OFSET and these are related to education and free software.

It took me the last evening to vote for the Gnome foundation board of director. I've decided to post it there my choices. I don't expect someone will care about that but in one year i will be able to review which people I choose and why.

• Bart Decrem has set up the Gnome foundation. Not a hacker but more a coordinator guy. We need at least on guy like him;

• Kjartan Maraas coordinator of the i18n stuff. We need at least ony guy like him so that english speaking people do not forget there is other language out there :);

• Miguel de Icaza no comment;

• John Heard, Sun has released as free software such a big and important piece of software that need a lot of work for integration with Gnome. We need at least on link-people with this project;

• Havoc Pennington, he's an hacker and he looks to have good communication skill, two good reason to get him in;

• James Henstridge, he's an hacker and among other things he gave Gnome the ability to speak Pyhton! One important stuff to make Gnome more easily used by apprentice developpers;

• George Lebl, hum not sure I should vote for him, but I like his sense of humour. After beeing a director, I'm afraid he will no more contribute code for Dr.Genius;

• Ettore Perazzoli, can't remember why I vote for him. Ah yes! For two good reasons: he's an hacker and italian! He also says: "Make Gnome a success outside the US" but well this is cheap word.;

• Owen Taylor, author of ORBIT stuff and developper in GTK & Pango;

• Daniel Veillard, I was not really sure to get Daniel in. Finally, I choose him because he has connection with standard stuff as the W3C and well he's french as me. After all, these are two good reasons to get him in. Getting a french director in the board can have some meaning and invluence in our "gargantuesque" administration. Also he develops libxml;

• Jim Gettys has good experience concerning the development and failure of the past GUI on UNIX. His experience will be very valuable to avoid the mistake that lead to this failure.

That's it.

The people I choose are all but two technicians.
I try to balance the technical ability so the board has an excellent overall knowledge on Gnome. The exception are only Jim, Bart, John but these ones have skill the other don't have. I also try to balance the geographic repartion and get some director from europe. I'm just disappointed we don't get candidate from asia.

Undo/Redo code is progressing smoothly. It now works for creation, deletion, motion, changing item attribute. This is a really nice feature. Also I 've take care to implement a nice way to handle the undo/redo-buttons/menu item, so that other DrGeniusMDI can use the same UI mecanism. When I'll have finished that, I've decided to implement Guile scriptability for the geometric engine, GKO will eventually help on that but well... I'm quite carefull with code contributor now, I've learn a lot with Dr.Genius concerning this topic, it's difficult for people to keep sustained motivation in free software project.

Today I start coding on undo/redo for DrGenius, this will bring lot of side effect as scriptability and even using Corba for a distance manipulation of a figure. At mid-day I stop hacking on that thing and try to work on the AI course. It's incredible how in one sheet of paper they can introduce you 10th of new symbols, 10th of definitions and it tooks you one hour to start to figure out these things. This course can make me feel asleep even on the morning, so i let you imagine after a lunch. Finaly I decide I better hacking on drgenius instead of sleeping...

I'm finaly back from Portugal to Taiwan, the trip was 30 hours long. My soon is very brave to support that!! He is now running with it's electric car in the appartment, he can't get sleep, so this gave me the opportunity to write some diary :)
The last two months in Europe were quite productive, thanks to a nice gift I made to myself before leaving Taiwan: an Acer TravelMate 345T, quite an impressive machine that gave me the opportunity to work on:

• the first draft for a free library managment software (there)
• to build up freeduc a database to categorize free software useable in education, the goal is more to allow to package software than categorize, so that software can be easily deployed.
• to work on Dr. Genius and finally to implement some old stuff of a todo list (well there weren't in the todolist): doublebuffering when moving a figure and a specific toolbar per category of DrGeniusMDIChild. Actually only DrgeoMDIChild use it. The last things may need some more work as it works well only with one GnomeApp. The DrgeoMDIChild toolbar also come with volatile sub toolbar.

Beside that, I was at the LSM event, a very cool non commercial event.

The school will start in one week, it will be paintful to slow down coding but I have decide to implement a database to register and categorize math. exercice, the final goal of the stuff is to allow teacher to build up quickly exercice sheets from exercices in the database. Of course the exercices have to be coded in LaTeX, DrGenius will be very helpfull to design geometric figure in LateX or eps. Oh well this will be a french specific stuff as I'm teaching in a french school. Finally I got a very good excuse to keep coding during this school year :)

Almost finish writing a Latex exporter for Dr Genius figure. All but the text is exported. This is cool so I will be able to produce high quality figure to put on student tests.

At least I finish - almost - to code the new geometric engine. I merge it on the HEAD last night, this was really weird as I need to edit the adminstration file - commitinfo - to get the merge accepted. Apparently a missing .sh extension on the file /cvs/gnome/CVSROOT/check-po-commit block the commit.

Lately, I'm rewriting the geometric engine of Dr Genius. It really needs some clean-up. Also i must credit Ilya Baran for its project Kseg, an interactive geometry free software under KDE. I don't get a chance to try it but looking at the source code, I saw very kind idea that I will use in Dr Genius. Good luck Ilya in your project (http://www.mit.edu/~ibaran). It seems we get very low activity in Dr Genius since one month. I hope my recent commits will remotive the team.